It comes from seemingly nowhere out of the ocean to inflict it's unintelligible mass of garbled horror upon your character's mind, breaking it in the process of trying to understand what he's seeing. This is shown, as the glitch has side effects after seeing it, like the mangled up hall of fame and somehow believing he has infinite copies of some item in his bag. Furthermore, when you meet him in the later versions, Gold and Silver, the poor guy's been rendered so insane that he can no longer speak, and has become a recluse in a cave.

considering missingno is there to keep the game from outright dying it is more of an angel than an abomination(though depending on the angel you imagine when you read this they could in fact mean the same thing)

Did they really have to insert this dummy/placeholder Pokémon instance? If it really was the case, the programmers did a horrible job at the code design (Really, just removing a part in an evolution cycle... maybe it was programmed in C or another non-OO language), but inserting such things are always fun...

For the side effects (item amount, fossil sprite, ...), the glitch is corrupting the stack/heap... (always fun to debug).Other pars were probably still left in because it would 'never be found anyway' *rolleyes*.

actually yes they did. coding is numbers and they had too few pokemon to fill the numbers they had to fill, missingno kept it from crashing as bad as it did on yellow(permanent stallouts, crashed data, broken games)

of course to understand why we ever saw missingno at all you must understand that mew was put in super late and they had to rush, because of mew some coding was not protected as well as it needed to be when the game was translated and people were able to hack the game and allow the missingno to be used. if it helps in the japanese games you generally white-out the screen if you try hacking a lot of the stuff in there

some of it, other parts were just a time thing, pokemon took years to be made and there were a lot of delays and corners cut to get the product out and not risk having it die in production

except all of this was handwritten and physically hardcoded into the game, it was not as simple as writing over some code, there were actual physical components needing fixed too as well as rewriting several key features so they could understand mew. it had a different set of parameters than any other pokemon and took up a space that no pokemon was supposed to take up, it also was done in a way that was different from any other pokemon so a lot of adjustments had to be made there too, adding, removing, altering and physically burning th information into the chip was all needed to get mew in and back then the process was not simple like it is now

frankly though, every time you say 'bad code design' you kind of make me mad. it was a rush design for certain but only a thickheaded neanderthal would call it that. the coding in the original pokemon is nothing short of amazing and many games now cannot even compare to it let alone anything then

You do not start the code design at the end of the developement, but at the beginning.

Indeed, they had to change more back then because everything was more low-level.But still, they had to use a more flexible object model for a Pokémon. Only do hacky stuff when you have no other choice.I do understand they did it because they didn't have enough time to change the object model.

I cannot say the end product wasn't amazing, but that doesn't mean that the source is well-written (Terraria, for example).

The first two links go to the C++ reference (things about a programming language), the third is to the website of a game. (they aren't harmful at all)

Your probably don't understand parts of what I'm saying because I am a programmer.

you must be so correct, i am only a lowly hacker who cut their teeth on pokemon and spent 6 years fiddling with the inner workings of blue, yellow and japanese green of all while researching it online and asking my coder fiance for help when i did not understand something, that might have been it and not the fact that you used sentence fragments and links instead of speaking clearly and concisely >x>;;

for what it was the source was very well written to begin with, the errors were put in post testing and in international shipping. it was not simply 'not having enough time' mew was an afterthought tossed in for fun, they rushed it in after the game went out of betatesting which caused errors. that is why green and red blanked out when you encountered an unoccupied slot

why did you link a c++ reference? pokemon was a gameboy color game, it was written in assembly. they are wholly different beasts, also, i do not know you and you seem pretty ignorant so forgive me for not trusting you

I'm hardly ever correct, I usually make a lot of derps. I mainly use C#, but sometimes C++ and Java, too.

I never looked at a disassembeled ROM, but everything sounds like it would be so.Rushing is always a bad idea.

Pokémon was originally created in 1996-1999, and C++ was created in 1983, so I tought...

I do know the difference between C++, ASM and C. C++ is object-oriented, and ASM is imperative and stack-based. All three of them are compiled to native code, so you can only convert it back to ASM anyway.

For the longest time, I've been wanting to see this guy in a new Pokemon game. But as awesome as that may be, I realized that I don't want Game Freak to outright admit that Missingno is a canon Pokemon because there's something about it that I do not want to see. *cough*copyright*cough*

Meanwhile in Japan:

Ken Sugimori: Okay, fans have been demanding that we put some sort of glitch into the next Pokemon game. What should we do?

I'll post this picture to my blog to accompany a Halloween Special story I wrote. Have no worries, I'll give credit. I'll write your nickname and link to your dA profile page.

My story was partly inspired by this piece of fanart. MissingNo is always an interesting aspect of the Pokémon series, and all teh things it can do make it feel like some cosmic horror monster. Oh, and let's not forget the terror felt by the Trainer who encounters it...

...and with the great insanity, came power enough to rival another tamer of legends (Ethan/Kris/Lyra), and an uncontrollable berserker affront to Arceus (Mewtwo). Eventually, his twin sister Leaf found him and slapped him back to enough sanity to be able to rejoin society and enter the PWT.

You know, this looks like it could be the storyline for some awesome cyberpunk horror story - the way a glitch like that turns the rules of the games universe into a thin, bouncy thread, and what it's equivalent in real life would be...